Recently, the volume of traffic flowing through an information communication network has considerably increased, and the power consumed by the entire network has also increased together. In particular, the power consumption of a router has increased significantly. Incidentally, a packet buffering and a routing table retrieval processing in the router occupy 30% or more of the entire power consumption.
Then, hitherto, Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and the like are known as techniques for improving the utilization efficiency of a network. In TDM, for example, data can be multiplexed on the time base and data traffic can be transferred in a bufferless manner. As for the traffic control to determine routes, however, each router executes a buffering and a routing. Accordingly, the power saving in the entire router is not so expected. In addition, because a packet is transferred in MPLS by using a label defined between routers, a load of the routing can be reduced. However, a packet collision cannot be avoided and the buffering is carried out. For that reason, the power saving in the router is not so expected as well.
As described above, in the conventional arts, network apparatuses such as the router carry out the buffering and routing, and it is impossible to significantly reduce the power consumption of the network apparatuses.